Religious Conversion, Women’s Agency, and Constitutional Morality: A Feminist Re-reading of the Constituent Assembly Debates on Articles 25-28

Abstract

In a feminist re-reading of the Constituent Assembly Debates (CAD) on Articles 25-28 of the Constitution of India, provisions that together constitute the constitutional architecture of religious freedom. While extensive scholarship exists on the drafting history of these Articles, most of it foregrounds the competing claims of the state, religious majorities, and religious minorities, treating women largely as incidental beneficiaries or silent subjects of the resulting settlement. I argue that the debates surrounding religious conversion, the right to “propagate” religion under Article 25, and the reformist proviso in Article 25(2)(b) were, in fact, deeply structured by anxieties about women’s bodies, women’s marital choices, and women’s capacity to convert, marry, or resist religious authority. Using a close, feminist reading of the CAD alongside secondary constitutional historiography, The Study demonstrates that women’s agency was simultaneously invoked and foreclosed: invoked as a rhetorical justification for state intervention against ‘forced’ or ‘induced’ conversion, and foreclosed by the near-total absence of women’s own voices in shaping the final text. This analysis within Ambedkar’s concept of constitutional morality, asking whether a morality of individual dignity and non-domination can be read into provisions that were, in their genesis, preoccupied with protecting religious communities from each other rather than protecting women from patriarchal control within any community. Relying on this I conclude that a feminist re-reading of Articles 25-28 unsettles the conventional majority-minority framing of religious freedom jurisprudence and reveals women’s agency as a submerged but recoverable thread in India’s constitutional founding.